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3 - Irony as Echo

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2018

Joana Garmendia
Joana Garmendia
Affiliation:
University of the Basque Country, Bilbao
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Summary

Sperber and Wilson, authors of Relevance Theory, defend the idea that irony is a case of echoic language. According to this view, a speaker, when being ironic, echoes a thought or an utterance that she attributes to someone other than herself at the current time. She also expresses a dissociative attitude towards that which she echoes. This is a strong alternative to the classical conception of irony as a figurative case, in which we have a pair of contradictory meanings. In this chapter, I analyze the details of the Echoic account of irony, and detect its shortcomings and strong points. This account acknowledges the possibility of being ironic and positive, and offers an explanation for positive ironies. It also focuses on differentiating echo and pretense --the first is considered to be essential in irony, whereas the latter is not. The difficulties that this theory faces come mostly from the notion of echo itself: it is a slippery notion that might not be easily applicable to every instance of verbal irony. Finally, I present two different developments of the Echoic account: Kreuz and Glucksberg’s Echoic Reminder theory, and Curcó’s proposal.
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Irony , pp. 42 - 64
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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References

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  • Irony as Echo
  • Joana Garmendia, University of the Basque Country, Bilbao
  • Book: Irony
  • Online publication: 06 March 2018
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316136218.003
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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Irony as Echo
  • Joana Garmendia, University of the Basque Country, Bilbao
  • Book: Irony
  • Online publication: 06 March 2018
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316136218.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Irony as Echo
  • Joana Garmendia, University of the Basque Country, Bilbao
  • Book: Irony
  • Online publication: 06 March 2018
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316136218.003
Available formats
×